Meowth's Party Impressions and Shots

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The Pokemon Stadium team put together its own little demo. Here's what we saw.

By IGN Staff

At the end of Mr. Miyamoto's Gamecube presentation, Nintendo tagged on yet another real-time demonstration of Gamecube's graphics prowess: Meowth's Party. Unlike most of the Gamecube demos at the show, Meowth's Party was interactive, similar to Microsoft's "Butterflies" Xbox demo.

Running in hi-res at 60fps (like the other Gamecube demos) Meowth's Party featured the talkative title hero dancing and singing on stage while more and more Pokemon kept pouring in. Next to old favorites from the original Pokemon games, Gold/Silver creatures like Marill and Elekid were also among the party audience, jumping, screaming and dancing in full polygonal goodness. Think of the "Dance Magic Dance" sequence from the movie Labyrinth to get an idea of what it looked like -- minus Bowie's painfully tight pants, of course. According to Nintendo, the development team behind this demo has simply taken the end sequences from the Pokemon anime show and turned it into an interactive 3D show.

While the demo wasn't graphically as impressive as some of the other Nintendo demos (mostly due to the simple design of its cartoony subjects and some minor framerate drops), it should be noted that the polygon models looked perfectly round and all animated independently and smoothly for the most part. Additionally, Gamecube effortlessly cranked out advanced lighting effects that doused the characters in ever-changing disco lights. To prove that the demo was running off the hardware, a Nintendo programmer controlled the camera with a wireless Wavebird controller.

Nintendo wouldn't comment on whether the demo was in fact indicative of work being done on a Pokemon game for Starcube, or was simply used to show off its characters. It should be noted, however, that the demo was prepared by the Pokemon Stadium N64 team -- which raises the question, what exactly are these guys working on now that Pokemon Stadium Gold and Silver is virtually complete? We'll have more news as it breaks.